All good items require parts, we're not letting crafters sit in their base and make the best gear without some looting. The reason they need parts is to take 5 brown ones and scrap them and then craft into 1 blue set.
Low quality Steel-tier drops aren't common enough for that to actually work though.
Maybe if you had gun-parts, tool parts and weapon parts, as the three broad categories.
As it is now though, you'll find one sledgehammer, one bat, one set of knuckles, a couple of crappy tools and maybe a spear.
As for guns... say you found a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun.
What did you spec into?
Trick question, doesn't matter. You don't have enough parts to make anything, because you only found one of each weapon-type, instead of five of the same type.
Then you randomly stumble onto a t4 baseball bat and decide "well, if I can't build the melee weapon I want, I guess i'll just have to start putting points into using this instead."
Guns are pretty much fine, because low-quality guns are fairly common, and you use the parts from double-barrels, handguns, hunting rifles and other ♥♥♥♥ty guns to make the higher tier varients, like SMGs, magnums and pump shotguns.
Also, if 'parts' are used to stop you from 'sitting on your base crafting everyhthing' then what the hell are mechanical parts, duct-tape, springs and suchlike for?
There are already plenty of crafting ingredients that either can't be crafted or require something else to create that you cannot craft or farm yourself.
All sitting in your base will get you is forged iron, lead and stone. Maybe gunpowder if you get lucky and hit coal/nitrate veins without having to leave.
Brass can't be mined at all, and your best bet to gather it is either Dukes from quests, or hacking up radiators or cars.
Duct-tape takes glue and cloth. Cloth is harvested out in the world (from grass if you have the skillbook, but guess what you have to do to find
that?) glue is gathered from bones.
You gotta kill animals or find gore-blocks for that. It won't just show up in your mineshaft.
Mechanical parts? Even when they were craftable, it wasn't worth it.
Springs? Same deal.
Electrical parts? Go take some houses apart.
Seriously, this whole line of thought seems... kinda shallow. Holing up in a base and never leaving hasn't really been viable in... quite a few updates.
You could theoretically live on nothing but vegetable stew and fight with only a bow, while living in a cave and never going outside, but horde-night would probably kill you because you don't have any real weapons, armour or the materials needed to make anything worthwhile.
The vast majority of the player-base already seem to split their time roughly 50/50 between base-buildup/upkeep and going out looting, scavenging, hunting or questing.
The core point is that we then use the things that we looted to make the things that we want, which we can no-longer do because crafting decent quality steel-tier items requires that we roll that item on the loot-table multiple times.
If you're going to force us to do that, they we might as well just hope to roll a quality five or six version of the item instead, and forego crafting entirely.
It's usually faster.
Maybe if low-quality steel-tier weapons/tools were as common as low-quality firearms, then it wouldn't be a problem, but then we'd be flooded with so many parts that they'd fail to serve any purpose anyway.
TLDR: Guns let you get the parts to make 'steel' guns like SMGs out of 'iron' guns like handguns, but tools and melee weapons don't.
No matter how many iron shovels you manage to loot, you won't be any closer to a steel one, until you either stumble across five steel tools, or happen across one that's actually worth keeping.
For machetes, I've done pretty well, but I've found zero steel knuckles, one bat (t2) and one spear (t4)
Oh, and maybe... I want to say two steel fireaxes, both found in cars?
That's not even enough parts to make a pickaxe. At my skill-level it takes IIRC 15 parts to make a single tool. I got
six.
If I can make t5 iron axes, and I have tons of steel laying around, and I already went out and hunted down the steel tool schematic, then I should be allowed to make myself a steel tool.
I already put like 10 levels worth of skillpoints into this, I spent hours in the mines getting my iron squared away and looted myself a crucible after hitting a string of big POI's day after day.
I even got lucky enough to find the tool schematic at a trader.
The fact that
all that isn't enough and I need to rely on RNG to get what I want feels like bullcrap, and it's all set up in such a way that if I happened to roll a decent quality pickaxe so that I don't even need to craft one anymore, I'll just be even more upset because all that time and effort was totally wasted.
The effort=reward part of your gameplay loop is broken.
That was simply awesome, looked good and made close combat rly fun again, why the heck it got removed???
